The Cypress Academy community took members of the Orleans Parish School Board to task Tuesday night (May 22) during a meeting at the Mid-City school hours after OPSB announced it would directly manage the charter school to keep it from closing by Wednesday.
Tuesday’s meeting was initially planned by the Cypress administration to explain to parents why its board voted on Sunday to merge the charter with the Lafayette Academy Extension at the Paul Dunbar Building in Hollygrove. The weekend announcement stated the school’s small headcount of students made it “very difficult” for the school to pay for the needs of its students.
Parents in the Cypress cafeteria audibly gasped after head of school Bob Berk told them Cypress has to raise about $600,000 to balance its budget for the next school year. Berk said Cypress even opened this school year on “a leaner model” than they did last year in an effort to maintain the school, which involved only using one co-teacher across grade levels instead of two. However, Berk said the school realized that the leaner model “wasn’t working school-wide.”
Berk said he managed to find a few donors willing to pay up to $250,000 to Cypress, but he acknowledged he did not feel like they would still be able to raise the full amount of funding in time. Several parents in the room filled with more than 30 people told Berk the board should have been more transparent with parents about their financial burdens…
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Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles.